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This is a wonderful short interview with the pianist Bill Evans. This is the first Bill Evans, the guy who played piano on the Miles Davis Kind Of Blue album. Not Bill Evans the banjo player or Bill Evans the sax player (who also played with Miles). Even if you are a hardcore bluegrasser and don’t like jazz there are lessons to be learned from the great musicians of all schools.

Bill Evans is a great interview. His thoughts are clearly stated and meaningful with no pretension. So often when musicians are interviewed they seem more interested in presenting a certain persona or selling records than in truly imparting wisdom.

The beginning of the interviewer’s question is cut off in the clip but he seems to be asking about about the broad (and not specifically musical) issue of pursuing knowledge of and mastery over a skill or a subject. He says…

“All they see is the end result rather than seeing the intrinsic value of that field (?) and what it can offer them”

Evans’ response is brilliant and vague enough that it can be useful to anyone striving to improve in any discipline-music, sports, computer programming, personal growth, etc.. His own words are better than any paraphrasing I could do but he seems to be saying that growth can be stalled or stunted by an inability to view the discipline honestly and realistically as one small problem before you at the moment which needs to be understood and dealt with rather than as a whole which is too big to be understood or to be confronted all at once.

“You can’t take the whole thing, and to approximate the whole thing in a vague way gives one a feeling that they’ve probably more or less touched the thing but in this way you just lead yourself toward confusion. And ultimately you’re going to get so confused that you’ll never find your way out.”

The rest of the interview is pure brilliance and honesty with more gems like…

“The person that succeeds in anything has the realistic viewpoint at the beginning and knowing that the problem is large and that he has to take it a step at a time and that he has to enjoy the step-by-step learning procedure”

And…

“The point is-what are you satisfied with? In other words, it’s better to do something simple which is real.”

Apply this wisdom to your own playing in whatever way seems appropriate. I understand it to mean that focusing on career success and reputation and being able to play as equals with the musicians that I most admire are only stumbling blocks in my own development. So is attempting to play Roanoke at 180 BPM when I can’t even play it as well as I should at 120 BPM. What Bill Evans would do is to sit down in his practice space and work on whatever neglected corner of his musicianship needs attention and address it in an honest and realistic way. The need to do this in order to develop is one thing that geniuses like Bill Evans and a beginner will always have in common.